I smiled at a woman in the grocery store the other day.
I smile at people. I always have. It costs nothing and it occasionally changes someone's afternoon.
She smiled back, and then she started telling me everything that's wrong right now. The tariff war. The mess between Canada and the US. The sense that it's all coming apart. And then she said the thing that stayed with me — People here won't pay attention. They don't care. They're too stupid to.
I don't think she meant it cruelly. I think she was tired, and worried, and a bit frightened, the way a lot of people are this year.
So I said, gently: well, if that's what you believe, then that's what it will be for you. I choose to believe people care.
We both went on with our shopping. But I thought about it for days.
What I'm not saying
I want to be careful here, because there's a version of this idea floating around that I don't believe for a second.
Nobody thinks their way to a full order book. Wishing is not working. I've spent forty-five years in product development and I have never once seen a business saved by a good attitude.
There are terrible things in the world. It's how we respond that makes all the difference.
And responding isn't the same as pretending. I'm not asking anyone to look away from what's hard, or to call a bad quarter a good one. Quite the opposite — look straight at it, name it plainly, tell yourself the truth about where you are. Then choose what you do next.
The seeing and the choosing are two separate acts. We tend to collapse them into one, as though recognizing a hard thing automatically dictates how we meet it. It doesn't. There's always a small gap in there, and that gap is where a life or a business actually gets decided.
The shop with the rain
I'm fond of a shop owner who tells me, every time we speak, that the weather is terrible and nobody comes in.
And she's right. Nobody comes in.
But watch what actually happened. Somewhere along the way she decided the season was lost. So she stopped calling her regulars to say what had just arrived. She stopped changing the window. She stopped asking the woman who bought three things in March whether she'd like to see the new pieces.
Her belief didn't empty her shop. It stopped the twenty small actions that would have filled it. Then the empty shop felt like proof, and the belief settled in deeper.
That loop isn't mystical. It's just mechanical. And it's very easy to miss from the inside, because the outcome really does arrive.
The founder version
I see it constantly in the businesses I work with, and it almost never announces itself as pessimism. It arrives sounding like realism, which is far more persuasive.
The market's dead right now — so the calls to buyers stop.
Tariffs are going to hurt us — so the next line doesn't get developed, at exactly the moment a quieter competitor is developing theirs.
Nobody's spending — so the emails don't go out, the samples don't get made, the follow-up doesn't happen.
Then a slow six months arrives and feels like confirmation. What's invisible is everything that didn't get done in the meantime.
Meanwhile, another founder in the same market, with the same tariffs and the same rain, spent those months making calls. Plenty went nowhere. Enough didn't.
The conditions were shared. The response wasn't.
Even in the hard things
When something genuinely difficult happens — an illness, a loss, a year that knocks the wind out of the business — you didn't cause it by thinking wrongly, and I'd never suggest you did.
But there's still a choice sitting inside it: whether you meet it believing the world is against you, or believing there are people who will help if you let them. One of those makes you ask. The other makes you go quiet.
I've watched people go through very hard things with their hands open, and I've watched people go through them alone. The circumstances weren't so different. The support they ended up with was.
And I don't always manage it either
I should be honest about something.
I don't always respond the way I'd like to. Some days I'm the tired one in the aisle. I haven't got the bandwidth, so I answer short, or I agree just to end the conversation, or I let someone else's mood become mine for the rest of the afternoon.
We're all carrying something. Nobody meets every moment well, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who claimed they did.
But it isn't a rule you keep or fail. It's something you come back to. You catch yourself a little sooner than last time. And the next person in the aisle gets a slightly kinder version of you than they would have got the day before.
The question I'd actually ask
Not are you being positive enough. That's a soft question and it deserves a soft answer.
Here's the one I'd sit with: what have you stopped doing because you'd already decided it wouldn't work?
The call you're not making. The line you're not developing. The customer you haven't followed up with because you assumed you knew the answer. That's where the belief is really costing you — not in your mood, in your calendar.
Pick one of those this week and do it anyway. Not because believing makes it happen.
Because doing it is the only way any of us finds out.
P.S. Yes — rose-coloured glasses. They're safety glasses, actually, and the lenses are clear. I like to see exactly what's in front of me and choose how to respond.
If you're carrying an idea and quietly wondering what the next right step is, that's where I come in. I mentor founders through the decisions that build real businesses — sourcing, costing, production, and the calls that are hard to make alone. You can see how I work, book a strategy call, or download my free From Idea to Income workbook here: https://cydneymar.com/pages/learn-about-the-program
Cydney Mar is a Product Development Strategist and Business Consultant with 45+ years and $300M+ in global retail, TV, and DTC sales. Cydney Mar Consulting is a 100% Aboriginal-owned company. I am Nlaka'pamux, Coast Salish from our West.